Yep, pretty sure I was on the mark with my original rant. Spent 2 more days now trying to do something as simple as watching a movie on my BB. Thought that would be a simple one since I had 10 or 12 full length movies previously formatted for my Pearl (originally) that played just fine on my Curve 8320 as well. Nothing doing on my 8330.

So after screwing around with mencoder, Super and BB Video Converter for hours and hours with no luck, I decided to install the bloated Roxio media centre piece of junk. What fun that was!!!!! The irony is, my original rant above is watered down now, because DM 4.2.2 DOES detect and preperly install my 8330 on my home computer. But back to the story: first I had to deal with the installation of Roxio that hangs on "gathering information" for seemingly 20 minutes. Decided to wait it out this time and I was rewarded for my patience with it actually installing. Then the crashing on startup came. Roxio kept trying to install DAO, but the files were "on the network and can't be found" or something like that. Trying to cancel just crashed the program. Not to worry, apparently a lot of people had the same experience, so Google's our friend right? Google told me to uninstall DAO, then restart Roxio. Awesome, Roxio starts now. Whoops, except Roxio tells me it can't convert ANY of my MPEG-2 files (why?) or even my VOB files. All of these MPEG-2 files were created to standard formats using my PVR software (SageTV) and convert just fine with anything else (mencoder, etc.), and as stated, these converted files used to play just fine on my previous two devices.

The answer? Have my PVR software convert it to another format and let Roxio convert that converted file (because of course, I have no life whateoever and have all the time in the world to convert files two, three, four times, whatever it takes right?). Success! The file played, but the file Roxio created was MASSIVE (one movie was almost a gig). Well, that won't stop me. We'll just get Super to convert that file to something more reasonable first, THEN use Roxio to convert it. Why not? We're in this deep.

BUT NO! Unfotuntaely, it was at this point I realized that installing Roxio gimped SageTV, the most important piece of software I have (at home). Now I was blessed with spending hours trying to recover that software. FIrst thing was re-install DAO. No luck. Reinstall Sage. Nope. Uninstall Sage and do a fresh install. Nope. Uninstall Roxio? NOPE BECAUSE IT HAS NO DAMNED UNINSTALL UTILITY EVEN UNDERR CONTROL PANEL. (BTW: it also runs a hidden listener program that starts with Windows that you'd never know without using msconfig to see what's starting). I have no idea if uninstalling Desktop Manager uninstalls it, because my next move was to do a Windows System Restore to the point before Roxio was installed. Bingo! Sage works again. But I guess I won't be viewing movies on my Blackberry. Ya gotta take the good with the bad though, right?

The moral of the story: maybe RIM was right in the first place when they avoided consumer toys and stuck to email and things they obviously know more about.